Brian Geoffrey Marsden, (born Aug. 5, 1937, Cambridge, Eng.—died Nov. 18, 2010, Burlington, Mass.) British-born astronomer who served (1968–2000) as director of the International Astronomical Union’s (IAU’s) Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, which disseminates information about newfound transient phenomena such as comets, novae, and supernovae. Marsden received an undergraduate degree in mathematics (1959) from New College, Oxford, and then worked at the Yale University Observatory. After having obtained a Ph.D. (1965) in astronomy from Yale, he joined the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. He later served (1978–2006) as the director of the IAU’s Minor Planet Center (MPC), which collects, checks, and disseminates observations and orbital data on asteroids and comets. In 1973 Marsden accurately predicted that Comet Swift-Tuttle, which had last passed Earth in 1862 and was widely predicted by other astronomers to return around 1981, would instead return in 1992. He twice announced that there was a small chance that Earth could collide with a cosmic object—the first being Swift-Tuttle and the second being asteroid 1997 XF11. These announcements were extremely controversial; however, Marsden credited the excitement they caused with spurring astronomers to find previous observations of these objects that ruled out collision with Earth. He was an early proponent of the demotion of Pluto from planetary status, which finally occurred in 2006—on the day he retired as director of the MPC.

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